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Mock Cream
2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 2 Tablespoons Sugar 2 Cups Scalded Milk 1 Teaspoon Vanilla Whites of 2 Eggs Mix the cornstarch and sugar, and cook in the hot milk 10 minutes. Strain and cool. Add vanilla and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Makes a good substitute for whipped cream.
A cornstarch blancmange thinned into a whipped-cream stand-in. The base is cooked, but the egg whites are folded into it cold and never heated again, which is where the recipe fails by current standards.
- The uncooked whitesThe milk and cornstarch are cooked, then strained and cooled before the beaten whites go in. Nothing after that brings the whites to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the dish is never heated again. A modern shell egg carries a small but real risk, and this dish gives the organism a sweet, low-acid milk medium to sit in.
- Why it is worse than raw egg in a batterA raw egg stirred into a cake or custard is cooked afterwards. Here the whites are the last addition and the dish is finished. There is no kill step at all, and no acid, alcohol or sugar concentration high enough to compensate. Use a current recipe for a cooked or pasteurized-egg-white cream instead.
- Holding and servingThe recipe gives no chilling or holding instruction of any kind, and a milk-and-egg-white foam left standing at room temperature is exactly the condition under which the risk compounds.
- "Scalded milk"Scalding means heating to just below the boil, around 180F, until a skin forms and bubbles ring the pan. It was commonly done to destroy souring organisms in raw milk; with pasteurized milk that purpose falls away, though hot milk still helps the starch cook.
- Ten minutes of cookingTwo tablespoons of cornstarch in two cups of milk gives a thin pouring sauce, not a set blancmange. The mixture will thicken fully within the first two or three minutes; the longer cooking does at least drive off the raw starch taste, since undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky.
- YieldSomething over two cups once the stiffly beaten whites are folded in.
"Mock" dishes fill a great deal of space in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks — mock turtle, mock duck, mock oysters — and almost all of them substitute something cheap and shelf-stable for something expensive and perishable. Heavy cream was both: it required a dairy that skimmed and sold fresh, and it would not keep in an icebox for long. Cornstarch, by contrast, was one of the great industrial groceries of the nineteenth century, milled from maize and sold in boxes with recipe leaflets that pushed exactly this sort of economy. A sauce that turned two cups of milk, a spoonful of starch and two egg whites into something you could pour over a pudding and call cream was precisely the kind of thrift such leaflets were selling.